An Unsuitable Match

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘What,’ Tyler said, emerging from the courtyard, ‘can Tyler do?’

  There was a small and sudden silence. They stared at him. Tyler tried very hard to think that the twins’ stares, in particular, weren’t unmistakably hostile. He smiled across the table at Rose. ‘Hey, Rose,’ he said.

  She didn’t move. She sat where she was, wine glass in hand, and gazed at him. She said softly, almost dreamily, ‘Hi there.’

  He blew her a leisurely kiss. Then he looked at the rest of them. He held a hand out to Laura.

  ‘You must be Laura.’

  She nodded. Next to her, Angus stood up. He held out his own hand.

  ‘I’m Angus. I’m married to Laura.’

  ‘Good to meet you. Which means that you are Emmy and you are Nat.’

  Rose seemed to swim to consciousness. She said faintly, ‘My twins.’

  Emmy said nothing. She glanced at her brother who was still staring at Tyler as if he were some sort of phenomenon. It was hard to imagine that whatever phenomenon Nat was visualizing was not something distinctly unpleasant. With determined cheerfulness, Tyler motioned towards the wine glass in front of the empty chair.

  ‘Is that for me?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rose said. She looked at him as if no one else were there.

  ‘I was going to get a beer,’ Nat said again. He sounded as if he were issuing a challenge.

  Rose tilted her head back so that she could see him. ‘No one’s stopping you, darling.’

  Nat reddened slightly. Emmy said plaintively, ‘Mum . . .’

  Tyler sat down. He turned to Laura. ‘So you’re the doctor.’

  She smiled at him and put her phone on the table. ‘I am.’

  Tyler pointed round everyone in turn. ‘Doctor, architect, IT, PR. Is that right?’ He glanced up at Nat. ‘If you’re going to get a beer, make it two, would you?’

  Wordlessly, but still managing to convey immense resentment at Tyler’s request, Nat turned from the table and vanished in the direction of the bar. Emmy said clearly to her mother, ‘I think he’s upset.’

  Rose regarded her. She smiled. She said, as easily as she could, ‘I can’t think why.’

  ‘Oh, Mum.’

  ‘Is your daughter coming?’ Laura asked Tyler.

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Rose.

  Emmy leaned closer to her mother. In a low and deliberately private voice, she murmured, ‘You know why Nat’s upset.’

  Rose put a hand out and squeezed her daughter’s arm. Then she said across the table to Laura, ‘Tyler’s daughter was so good in the Ibsen. Her English accent was perfect.’

  ‘She had an excellent coach,’ Tyler said.

  ‘Ibsen was Norwegian,’ Angus said. ‘So why does anyone playing him need to sound English?’

  Tyler smiled at him. ‘Tradition, maybe?’

  Nat came back to the table and dropped into his chair.

  ‘Where’s your beer?’ Emmy said.

  Nat shrugged slightly. ‘The waiter’s bringing them,’ he muttered, staring at his lap.

  Angus said to Tyler, ‘You must get almost sick of wine, in California.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, pushing his glass away, ‘I grew up here, so I grew up drinking beer. It’s a kind of habit, I guess.’

  Rose said teasingly, ‘I hadn’t noticed.’

  He turned to smile at her, his face softening. ‘There’s a lot for you to learn yet.’

  ‘Clearly.’

  ‘Please!’ Nat said suddenly.

  Laura shook her head at him. ‘Honestly, Nat. So – squeamish.’ She glanced at Tyler. ‘Apologies for my brother.’

  ‘None needed or expected. But thank you.’

  Rose said to Nat, ‘Explain your job to Tyler. Just describing it as IT doesn’t begin to do it justice.’

  ‘Yes, please do,’ Tyler said encouragingly. He leaned forward.

  Nat didn’t look at him. He said, with elaborate reluctance, ‘It’s – um – part of a financial institution. Like – a hedge fund.’ He stopped.

  Tyler said helpfully, ‘I know what a hedge fund is.’

  ‘Go on, darling.’

  Nat looked at the table top. In a slow and surly tone of extreme indifference, he continued, ‘I kind of devised a system for them. Special algorithms for their needs. I wrote the programmes.’

  ‘Impressive,’ Tyler said politely.

  Emmy was looking at her brother. ‘They promoted him.’ She sounded defiant.

  ‘I’m sure they did.’

  ‘It’ll be a seat on the board next,’ said Rose.

  Nat gave a sigh of exasperation. He rolled his eyes at Emmy as if to say, ‘What did we do to deserve a mother like this?’ Then he said, in a voice of barely concealed vexation, ‘Mum. You don’t know that.’

  ‘But I’m expecting. And hoping. I’m very proud of you, darling.’

  ‘Don’t embarrass him, Mum, Emmy said.

  ‘I’m proud of all of you,’ Rose said, determinedly. ‘I’m proud of Angus, if it comes to that, and he isn’t even mine. You are all doing interesting worthwhile things and you are all in paid employment. I think both those things are worthy of huge pride.’ She looked at Tyler. ‘Don’t you?’

  He smiled at her. ‘Indeed.’

  Laura said, ‘I’d have expected you to say “sure”, after all those years in America.’

  ‘I took a perverse pleasure in staying as English as I could.’

  Emmy was staring at a point above Angus’s head. The waiter stood there with two bottles of beer on a tray, and beside him was a small girl with ruby-red hair and a huge slouch bag on her shoulder. Tyler sprang up.

  ‘Mallory!’

  She allowed herself to be embraced.

  ‘Hi, Daddy.’

  Tyler turned round, his arm encircling Mallory’s shoulders.

  ‘Everyone, this is my daughter, Mallory. Mallory, this is Rose. Rose. Who I have talked to you about. And this is Rose’s elder daughter, Laura, and her husband, Angus. And these are Rose’s twins, Emmy and Nat. If – if we had Seth here, we’d have everyone. Everyone who matters.’

  Mallory looked at them all slowly, her gaze flicking from face to face. She adjusted a piece of chewing gum from one cheek to the other. Then she smiled at Rose.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  She motioned to the waiter to bring an extra chair and place it next to Nat, and dropped her slouch bag off her shoulder. A tiny jewel inserted into the side of her nose flashed sudden fire as she bent to release her bag. Then she straightened up again.

  ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Look at you. You all look like you need some lines to say.’

  *

  ‘Thank goodness for Mallory,’ Rose said.

  They were sitting side by side at the back of a crowded pizzeria, sharing a wheel-sized Napoletana that Tyler had cut into manageable strips. He had taken his blazer off, and rolled up his shirtsleeves, and Rose had been unable to help noticing that his forearms contrasted impressively with the T-shirt-exposed arms of men around him who were less than half his age.

  Tyler tipped his head back to receive the end of a pizza slice. He said, round the pizza, ‘It wasn’t so bad.’

  ‘It was,’ Rose said. ‘It was awful. The twins . . .’ She stopped and then said, ‘I’m used to being so proud of the twins.’

  Tyler put the remaining half of his pizza slice down. ‘You could be tonight.’

  ‘Not really. Not seeing them being so babyishly possessive. I didn’t like it.’

  Tyler wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. ‘Can’t be easy, can it? They have you all to themselves for seven years . . .’

  ‘But they’re not fourteen,’ Rose said, ‘they’re adults. Technically, anyway. Adult enough to hold down jobs and live independently. It was like wading through treacle till Mallory came.’

  Tyler gave a tiny smirk. ‘She was pretty great.’

  Rose looked at him. She said sharply, ‘I can say that. You can’t.’

  He ra
ised an eyebrow. ‘Oh?’

  ‘As the father of the best-behaved child, you are obliged to say nothing at all in her favour.’

  He turned to face her. ‘You’re not serious.’

  ‘I am,’ Rose said. ‘I am deadly serious. I am the tiger mother whose cubs have let her down and it makes me very dangerous.’

  ‘Goodness,’ Tyler said. ‘You mean it.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Are – are we having a row? Our first row?’

  Rose said nothing.

  ‘Rosie?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rose said. ‘I just want to cry. And hit something.’ She clenched her fists. ‘I just wanted tonight to go well. I so wanted it to go well.’

  ‘It did.’

  She turned to face him. ‘It did not,’ she said furiously. ‘You did your best, and Laura and Angus were fine, but the twins were awful. Rude and childish and awful. I was . . . I was ashamed of them.’

  Tyler pushed away the remains of the pizza and rolled his shirtsleeves down. Buttoning the cuffs, he asked, ‘Were you ashamed of me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t sound very certain.’

  Rose picked up her water glass and took a swallow. ‘It wasn’t you.’

  ‘Wasn’t it?’

  She said, with difficulty, ‘I felt so sure, when we got there. I was longing for you to come. And then you did come, and I was so thrilled, and then somehow, sitting there between the twins, I began to feel that – oh, I don’t know, I just didn’t feel so . . .’ She stopped.

  ‘Convinced?’

  She looked down and said, almost in a whisper, ‘It suddenly didn’t seem so glorious.’

  ‘What didn’t? Please look at me.’

  Rose sighed. ‘Not here.’

  ‘Rose. Tell me. What didn’t seem so glorious?’

  ‘Being in love with you,’ she replied sadly, not looking at him.

  He let a beat fall, and then he said, ‘Do you really think it’s fair to take your disappointment over that one little meeting out on me?’

  She looked away from him. ‘Probably not.’

  He waited.

  ‘I’m not used to not being in my children’s good books,’ she said. ‘Well, their best books if I’m honest. And I’m not used to them being less than wonderful.’

  ‘Laura was lovely.’

  ‘Please don’t,’ Rose said. ‘Please don’t make comparisons.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘I know I’m not being reasonable. I know it isn’t fair to you. But I feel so jangled up and jagged.’

  Tyler reached behind him for his blazer, dropped on the back of his chair.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  Rose picked up her bag. ‘OK.’ Then to the bag, rather than to Tyler, she said, ‘I don’t think I want you to come home with me tonight.’

  *

  Sleep proved impossible. The tensions of the evening, only exacerbated by the courteous walk to her front door – he delivered her home, she reflected, with all the formality of an old-fashioned chauffeur – were only lying in wait until they could get her to themselves. She had thought, in a wild, unmanaged way, that all she needed was to be alone and no longer in Tyler’s tolerant if faintly reproachful company, but the moment the front door was closed behind her she was consumed by a longing to have him there with her once more.

  He had kissed her cheek. Firmly. One side and then the other, holding her shoulders as he did so. He’d said, ‘Good night, Rosie. Sleep well.’

  But he hadn’t said he’d call in the morning, or made a plan to meet her the next day, or made a single reference to the future. He had kissed her cheeks, and let her go, and she had heard his footsteps going resolutely down the mews until they faded around the corner. She went into the kitchen and made chamomile tea, organizing her vitamin supplements for the next day and checking her phone and emails for messages. Then she inspected the locks for the night, climbed the stairs and ran herself a bath. Once in the bath, she began to cry. She was not, by nature, a weeper, but this was hardly weeping. It was, she thought, giving way completely, with her mouth open, more like bawling.

  It was very tiring, to cry and sob and howl like that. She dragged herself out of the bath exhaustedly and climbed into her pyjamas, then leaned against the basin to brush her teeth and cream her face. Over the edge of the washcloth, she looked at herself with loathing. Red-eyed, blotchy, with weird striped hair standing up in tufts and hanks. Hideous. Hideous.

  She went slowly out of the bathroom towards her bedroom, feeling along the walls as if she were very old and frail. Once in bed, she lay in the darkness and stared into it, worn out and defiantly, suddenly, sleepless. She put out an arm and switched on her bedside radio and there was the Speaker of the House of Commons intoning, ‘Order, order,’ over a rabble of men shouting about transport systems in the north of England. She switched the radio off again, and lay there, just staring, her mind darting hither and yon, hurling itself against one unacceptable memory after another.

  She heard midnight strike, and then one in the morning. She told herself, variously and unstoppably, that she was a bad mother, that Tyler was in essence a bad idea, that the twins were not to be blamed, that Tyler was entirely right, that the twins had behaved disgracefully, that she had defended the wrong people, that she had destroyed her last chance of romantic happiness, that she had got all her priorities wrong – or right – that Tyler would want to have nothing further to do with her and that that was probably the best solution, while being simultaneously the one idea she could not bear. At two o’clock, she disentangled herself from her bedclothes and went down to the kitchen to make more tea, which she carried back upstairs, intending to re-make her bed and try to start the night again.

  Her mobile phone lay charging on the carpet inside her bedroom door. She bent to see if there were any messages. There were none. Nothing. She stood there, a mug of chamomile tea in one hand and her phone in the other. And then, before she could change her mind, she put the tea down beside her bed and impulsively dialled Tyler’s number.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  William Woodrowe telephoned one of his children, in strict rotation, every Sunday morning. It was, of course, Sunday night in Melbourne, convenient for someone who prided himself, as William did, on his alertness in the evenings, and he always made whichever child he was speaking to carry their phone to the nearest window and describe the inevitably dismal English weather outside to contrast with whatever was magnificently happening in southern Australia. It had become something of a standing joke for his children. They learned to paint a perpetually sodden picture of low grey skies and relentless drizzle, whatever the actual weather, in order to allow their father his regular triumph of having had yet another day of cloudless skies and record temperatures. It was a kind of ritual. He needed to be able to congratulate himself on a weekly basis, as if Australia itself was confirming the rightness of the decisions he had made that had so rocked his children’s world.

  Laura was still in bed when her father rang. Angus had got up soon after seven, taking the two little boys downstairs for bowls of cereal in front of their permitted Sunday morning treat of television cartoons. He had returned with tea for Laura and then disappeared to his own office on the top floor where he was working, he told Laura, on the specific uses architects might find in a 3-D printer. Laura, who was much more interested in the workings of physiology than of 3-D printers, smiled at him in her famously absent way, and thanked him for the tea. She squinted at the clock. It was almost nine. As it was her turn for a call from Australia, nine o’clock was when it would come. William was a punctual man; as punctual, Laura reflected, sipping her tea, as his younger daughter was not.

  ‘I mean to be,’ Emmy said, perpetually arriving late in a flurry of bags and breathlessness. ‘I start punctually and then something always, always happens.’

  One minute after nine, Laura’s phone rang. She held it to her ear.

  ‘Morning, Dad.’

/>   ‘Darling,’ William said. ‘Not on call then?’

  ‘Not this weekend.’

  ‘It’s still light here. Spectacular sunset. How are the boys?’

  ‘Watching SpongeBob SquarePants.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Laura said. ‘It’s their Sunday morning treat – an hour of telly rubbish.’

  ‘What’s the weather up to?’

  Laura looked towards the window. ‘You know, Dad,’ she said, humouring him.

  ‘Sunday,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Grey and damp. Such an enervating climate.’

  ‘I think it’s quite peaceful,’ Laura said. ‘It kind of allows one to flop about.’

  ‘How’s things?’

  Laura flapped a hand in the air. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘You know. Rather too much work for both of us, but that’s our choice. Jack says he has a wobbly tooth but I don’t believe him. He’s at an age where he thinks it gives him status to have a wobbly tooth.’

  William said, in a slightly different tone, ‘Emmy rang me.’

  Laura sat up a little. ‘Did she?’

  ‘Yes. About your mother.’

  Laura pulled herself up against the pillows. ‘Go on,’ she said neutrally.

  ‘It appears that your mother has met someone.’

  Laura closed her eyes briefly. ‘So?’ she replied, in a friendly voice.

  ‘Well,’ William said, ‘it sounds serious. It sounds as if this is rather more than a . . . than a romantic friendship. Emmy said that it had only been going on for ten minutes but that your mother is already talking of – of marriage.’

  ‘She’s allowed to, you know,’ said Laura reasonably. ‘She’s been alone for over seven years. She’s allowed to have a relationship.’

  ‘A relationship,’ William said heavily, ‘is very different from a marriage.’

  Laura looked towards the door. It would be wonderful if the little boys decided to burst in at that moment, or Angus appeared to see if she would like a refill for her tea. She badly wanted to say to her father that she didn’t think her mother’s love life was any of her ex-husband’s business, but at the same time, she was very conscious of how easy it was, on long-distance phone calls, to create the perfect opportunity for misinterpretation. So she said, lamely, ‘Oh, it’s early days.’